Shane Doan remains a man without a contract. Why? The Coyotes' captain has several options — including one he might not be considering enough. Plus, CBA stall tactics and an Olympic debate.

Donald Fehr (AP)

1. Everyone loses

In the three weeks since the NHL made its initial proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement, the NHLPA, led by executive director Donald Fehr, has been on an informational mission, spending many of the negotiating sessions in New York and Toronto asking questions of the league. The union wants to gain a full understanding of why management is asking for drastic cuts to the players’ share of hockey-related revenue, along with other measures that the NHLPA finds unpalatable and many outside observers find unreasonable.

The result is that the owners’ first offer remains the only one on the table, with phrases like “46 percent of revenues,” “10 years until unrestricted free agency” and “five-year entry-level contracts” lingering in the air like a stale fart. The proposal was outlandish, but it was a starting point, and now the union is giving the appearance of stalling, as it requests still more information from the league.

“We did begin to get the first installment of club financial information that we’d requested, and they’d undertaken to begin to produce,” Fehr said on Tuesday in New York before heading to Europe to give players there an update on talks. “I am told that it’s the first small portion of it, with far and away the overwhelming majority yet to come. That will be coming in course. For us to be in position to make a comprehensive response or counterproposal or alternative proposal to the clubs’ principal economic proposal, obviously, we’re going to have to be in a position to complete that process. That’s going to take some time.”

That “first installment,” that “first small portion,” represented 76,000 pages of financial information. If 76,000 pages represented the total package, it would be more than 2,500 pages per team. Just for comparison’s sake, the 2005 CBA—an unreadable document if there ever was one—was 472 pages. A sample from page 186: “Any deferred salary that will be earned for services rendered during the 2005-06 League Year shall be counted for purposes of the Players’ Share and the Upper and Lower Limit at its present value at 1-Year LIBOR plus one and one-quarter (1.25) percent in the year for which it is to be earned (unless the Deferred Salary is to be paid with interest, in which case it shall be counted in the League Year in which the Player performs the services for which it is earned, at the Deferred Salary’s stated cash amount), pursuant to subparagraph (A) above.”

Oh, of course, the famous subparagraph (A), which defines explicitly how much rent is to be paid if the Race Car lands on Electric Company. Actually, a Monopoly comparison might be apt, because the main appearance given by the NHLPA in asking for hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, six weeks before the expiration of the CBA, is that of someone complaining about the performance of the banker in the classic board game.

It should not take 76,000 pages of financial documents, or whatever the final total winds up being, for the NHLPA to be able to say to the NHL, “Your first offer was ludicrous and obviously a wish list. We’d like the opposite of everything you asked for, and a Lamborghini for every player in the league.” At least then the league could come back with an offer of a tricycle for every player, and there would finally be some real negotiations.

The problem is that having real negotiations does not benefit the NHLPA, because Fehr has repeatedly made the point that the union would be perfectly happy to continue operating under the current CBA after it expires on Sept. 15. It’s a public relations masterstroke by the union, shifting all responsibility in fans’ eyes to the league in the event of a work stoppage. Fehr has made it clear that it would be the owners locking the players out, not the players going on strike, at a time when the NHL has boasted record revenues, and small-market teams have given out eye-popping contracts.

The problem is, if there is a work stoppage, both sides will be easy to blame—the owners for making demands out of line with any other professional sports league and for enacting the lockout, and the players for taking so long to engage in negotiations beyond “a frank exchange of ideas,” one of the recurring Sixth Avenue catchphrases this summer.

It’s time for both sides to get serious, rather than pushing papers around, because if there is a lockout, the players won’t be the only ones out of work. The ushers, beer vendors, camera operators, Zamboni drivers, and everyone else whose livelihood depends on NHL games being played, do not have six, seven and eight-figure annual salaries to fall back on. For them to work this fall, the NHL and NHLPA must get to work now.

Shane Doan (AP Photo)

2. Come back, Shane!

Shane Doan became a free agent on July 1. He determined that he would not make a decision on whether to leave the Phoenix Coyotes until July 9. When that came and went, Doan's new deadline for a decision was July 16. Then it was July 27, with Doan saying he wanted to make a decision quickly so that he could get his family settled for his children to start the school year.

Here it is, August, and Doan still is a man without a contract. If he really wanted to leave the Coyotes, he would have done so by now. It is clear that the 35-year-old winger wants to stay in Phoenix, where he has played ever since the Coyotes moved from Winnipeg. So, why doesn't he?

Doan wants a multiyear deal, reportedly in the range of four years and $30 million. There's little doubt that he would be able to get it. But if he does not want to leave Phoenix, he has an option, even with the future of the Coyotes in doubt: Sign a one-year contract.

Even if the sale of the Coyotes to Greg Jamison falls through, there is no way that the NHL would be able to relocate the franchise on such short notice, especially with everything else on the league's plate. If Doan wants to stay in Phoenix, and his continued extension of deadlines is a clear indication of his desires, then he should do what he wants. Nobody is stopping him. Give it another go with Mike Smith, Keith Yandle and Oliver Ekman-Larsson. If Doan wants to play for a contender, a team that just went to the Western Conference finals isn't a bad choice.

Would it be a gamble for Doan to leave money on the table now? He'd run the risk of injury, but it isn't as if he'd be hurt by CBA changes—at 36 next summer, Doan would qualify for unrestricted free agency even by the league's proposed 10-year standard, and it's not as if he would be looking for a decade-long deal.

There also is the chance that Doan could make more money by signing a one-year deal now, then going for a three or four-year deal next summer, with the Coyotes or otherwise. If Alex Semin can get $7 million from the Hurricanes on a one-year deal, why can't Doan get $8 million from Phoenix, especially considering that the Coyotes need to spend about that much to reach the current CBA's salary floor?

Doan made $22.75 million over the past five years with the Coyotes. Shouldn't that give him the security to make a decision that will make him happy?

Peter Laviolette (AP Photo)

3. Re-Pete as needed

Peter Laviolette will not get to coach Shea Weber, but the 47-year-old bench boss, who won the Stanley Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in 2006 and led the Flyers to the Finals in 2010, will be staying in Philadelphia for the foreseeable future after agreeing to a contract extension through 2015.

The Flyers have won 122 of 221 regular-season games under Laviolette’s stewardship, with a 23-22 record in the playoffs. It is a measure of Laviolette’s abilities that after trading Mike Richards and Jeff Carter last summer, the Flyers did not miss a beat, posting 47 wins for the second consecutive season.

“We dealt with certain injuries and things that I think our club had to overcome,” Laviolette said on a conference call to announce his extension. “We used a lot of good, young defensemen and a lot of good players. I am excited about the players that we brought into the fold this year. I think it is going to be an exciting time to be building it back up from where we left off and adding the new players into the mix.”

In addition to their usual cadre of high-salaried veterans, the Flyers mixed in five rookies who played at least 40 games last season: Marc-Andre Bourdon, Sean Couturier, Matt Read, Zac Rinaldo and Brayden Schenn. As those players benefit from experience, and further grasp Laviolette’s system, the Flyers should continue to be a power in the Atlantic Division, even after missing out on Weber, who returned to Nashville after the Predators matched the Flyers’ 14-year, $110 million offer sheet to the defenseman.

Philadelphia always has a talented team, a credit to ownership’s willingness to spend, general manager Paul Holmgren’s unmatched cojones, and, of course, the talent of the players themselves. Navigating an always-in-flux situation and continuing to get the best out of those players? That credit goes to Laviolette, and his extension is well deserved.

4. Mail call

“How about the Stanley Cup winner playing the Gagarin Cup winner (KHL champion) for some kind of peaceful Brotherhood of Hockey title?”—Maia

As cool of an idea as this is, the gap between the NHL and KHL is far too wide at this point to even consider it.

The winner of the Gagarin Cup this season was Dynamo Moscow, whose leading scorer, with 29 points in 53 games, was Marek Kvapil, a former sixth-round pick of the Tampa Bay Lightning whose achievements on this side of the Atlantic included 32 goals in 175 AHL games between Springfield and Norfolk. After bouncing back and forth between the ACHL and ECHL, Kvapil wound up in the Czech league for three seasons before joining Dynamo last fall.

In the KHL playoffs, Dynamo’s leading scorer, with a more impressive 20 points in 21 games, was Konstantin Gorovikov, the Ottawa Senators’ ninth-round pick in 1999 who had two unremarkable seasons in the old International Hockey League—16 goals and 33 assists in 79 games for the Grand Rapids Griffins—before heading back to Russia.

One player from Dynamo’s championship run is coming to North America now—in May, the Toronto Maple Leafs signed 25-year-old Leo Komarov, born in Estonia and raised in Finland, to a one-year, entry-level contract. He may or may not be able to play for a non-playoff team in the NHL.

What would be far more interesting than a Stanley Cup-Gagarin Cup series is a series between the NHL’s champions and either a team of KHL All-Stars, although even then, last season’s top scorer in Russia was Alexander Radulov.

For now, the talent gulf is too wide, before even thinking about the details that would need to be worked out to make a new Super Series a reality—as exciting as it would be.

5. Bonus mail call

“Do you think there are NHLers who could legitimately compete at the Summer Olympics (if they trained a bit, etc.)? If yes, who and in which discipline? Zdeno Chara has the look of a water polo goalkeeper to me.”—Greg Miller

Chara might have a problem with the whole no-touching-the-bottom-of-the-pool thing, and the whole “Canucks diving team” gag has already run its course. In all honesty, NHL players are elite athletes who could hold their own in several Olympic sports if given the right training—beyond the obvious choice of boxing for some artful enforcers, it would be conceivable that several hockey players would have the hand-eye coordination to be successful at archery or shooting events.

If I had to pick one NHL player for one Summer Olympic event, though, it would be to see how Pavel Datsyuk could adapt his magic hands to the movements of fencing.